COME CLEAN, ALGER HISS

...And Hiss' conviction, by my judgment, is extremely unlikely to be reversed on any of the rather technical grounds on which it is being appealed...

...That, at least, is the best guess of this skeptical observer who strongly doubts every other story "Hello, Mr...

...For joining the Communist Party in this country, even in the 1930's, required, for a man of Hiss' background, position, and _ promise, a great deal of idealistic if misguided moral courage...

...But granted these two traits, Alger Hiss might well have pretended he was a Communist, if he felt that (1) he could do it safely and without a real commitment and (2) that it might help his career...

...But just in case the Communists really represented the wave of the future, just in case their already sizable influence in liberal and labor activities was destined to grow, he would secretly let them think he was one of them...

...I know that many more people— and not only the bitterly anti-New Deal, anti-Fair Deal boys who wanted to believe it from the beginning—think that Hiss was a full-fledged, whole-hearted Russian spy...

...Merely the occasional sympathetic talk, with Chambers and others, of Party affairs and Party aims—and the appearance of actual membership...

...Now is the time—while McCarthy's charges hang humid and heavy, as a potential threat, over every liberal in public service—for Alger Hiss to speak up and tell his true story...

...Yet Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in a way to warrant the public assumption that, in effect, he was proved a Communist spy...

...I imply, of course, that Hiss has not told his true story...

...There is the one question that McCarthy-applauding reactionaries delight to ask and that even the wisest anti-Communist liberal cannot quite answer: "Yeah, sure, but how about Alger Hiss...

...Perhaps their emotions have been less blindly bound up with one side of the FRED RODELL, professor of law at Yale, is the author of "Woe Unto You, Lawyers," "Fifty-Five Men — The Story of the Constitution," and "Democracy and the Third Term...

...Where is McCarthy's proof...

...He has one chance left, and only one, to perform a decent service for the nation, for liberalism, and even for himself...

...Granted these two traits, Hiss could never have been a genuine Communist...

...It is built on my picture of Hiss' personality and character, as pieced together second-hand from accounts of people who used to know him rather well...

...This story has never rung true to me...

...If my guess should be right or nearly right, there is not the tiniest danger that the Hiss pattern could be repeated today...

...The solution should look so simple, so completely cut-and-dried: a headline-hunting Senator, equally reckless of public welfare and of private reputations, gone on a binge of liberal-baiting with no basis in fact...

...One was a driving, if sometimes shrewdly disciplined, ambition to get ahead, to be important, to become a powerful figure, a famous man...

...where is his evidence to back these bitter and crucial accusations...

...Pressed perhaps for proof of his Party loyalty after he entered the State Department, Hiss may well have copied off some rather innocuous papers whose "confidential" markings gave them a spurious air of importance, never dreaming it conceivable that those copies, more than a decade later, would be traced to the old typewriter he then owned...

...For Hiss, too, was defended by respectable, honorable men and the case against him, in the beginning, looked every bit as crack-pot as does the case against, say, Owen Lattimore now...

...As I write, not one shred of evidence that would stand up in even a stupid court has been produced...

...But there is a tremendous residue of observers who have never seen the Hiss-Chambers matter in such black-or-white terms and who still do not see it so today...

...No matter what the outcome of his appeal and of a remotely possible third trial, Alger Hiss' career is kaput...

...The almost u-nanimous national attitude toward Russia and toward Communism has been, for the past five years, so utterly different from what it was during the 1930's that no able, clever man, ambitious for advancement, could conceivably suppose that pretending to Party membership might some day help advance his personal career...

...to date, including those told on the witness-stand by Hiss and by Chambers...

...Hiss' bland professions of innocent ignorance, and who desperately needed some rationalization that would keep their hero a hero...

...By contrast, respectable, honorable men —from Stimson and Marshall on down—have spoken out strongly against McCarthy's charges...

...I imply also that Hiss was not, as Whittaker Chambers charged, a deliberate, dedicated, completely convinced Communist...

...But even this action, stupid in retrospect, may have seemed safe at the time...

...I can't quite see any loyal wife —with so little, comparatively, to lose—keeping quiet while her husband smashes His entire career for the sake of her good name: I especially can't see her keeping quiet after the conviction...

...The press and radio, naturally, headline and broadcast the charges...

...III There were, I take it, two things about Hiss that have never been stressed in all the millions of words that have been written about him...

...moreover, it was the sort of all-your-eggs-in-one-basket step that no clever and ambitious man in Alger Hiss' place would ever dream of taking...

...Come on, Alger Hiss, come clean...

...The other was a certain lack of moral courage, not obvious but subtly present, especially where sticking to principle might stand in the road of ambition and slow down the Hiss career...

...If this hypothesis should be sound, the one slip Alger Hiss made was in turning over to Chambers the documents that were later to convict him...

...My own guess—and it is no more than that—of the true story of Alger Hiss has the vice of being quite simple and unmelodramatic...

...Other rumor-spread stories start with the attribution to Chambers of an unpopular form of emotional irregularity and have Hiss now protecting himself, now protecting his stepson, from the revelation of sins deemed worse than espionage—or else (from some die-hard defenders of his total innocence) they have Hiss the hapless victim of Chambers' twisted revenge...

...Roughly, their feeling is that Hiss lied—and was thus properly convicted of perjury— but that he was never the sort of Communist that Chambers accused him of being, which means that Chambers lied too...

...It struck me as plausible well over a year ago and I have seen no reason since to revise it...

...And just so long, the mad mouthings of men like Sen...

...II Among the many here's-the-low-down explanations that have gone the rounds of rumor, the most widely circulated has it that Hiss lied out of super-decency to protect his wife Priscilla who, it is said, was the real Communist culprit...

...And yet—and yet...

...Perhaps, then, ambitious Alger Hiss, not wanting to miss a bet, thought he saw a way to ride two horses at once...

...In short, perhaps Alger Hiss never was a Communist and, indeed, had no sympathy with them, but merely played the part for his own selfish purposes and played it a little too well...

...But so long as the story goes un-refuted and widely accepted that Hiss was really a Communist, then anyone superficially like him—no matter how ringed with respected and trusting friends—might similarly be a Communist today...

...I know that some of Hiss' more ardent protagonists still think—or say they think—that Hiss told the truth from start to finish, which means that he was framed...

...Churchill...

...If he does not tell it, every progressive citizen in Government work for years to come will be wide open to such accusations of Communism as McCarthy is shouting to every wind today— and no mountain of counter-evidence, no flood of character witnesses, will ever quite answer the stark question: "Yeah, sure, but how about Alger Hiss...

...case or the other...

...Back in those days, the Communists, pushing the Popular Front for their own purposes, were often in the van of liberal action, not only abroad but at home, as in the burgeoning C.I.O...

...McCarthy, his irresponsibility matched only by his cowardice in skulking behind Congressional immunity, tosses blanket charges of Communism at Hanson, at Service, at Lattimore...

...On the record, he would remain the able, loyal public servant, climbing ahead in respectable, conventional fashion...

...Moreover, this story stems originally from firm believers in Hiss who could not quite swallow, in the face of the evidence...

...The only thing all these tales have in common is a core of disbelief that either Hiss or Chambers told the whole truth...

...where is his substantiation...

...No signing of party cards or party petitions, no writing for the Daily Worker or the New Masses, nothing overt that could be pinned on him afterward if things broke the other way...

...They feel that the truth rests somewhere, sfcill un-revealed, between or outside the two men's stories...

...There have been only evasive hunches and vague impressions plus the pseudo-testimony of second-or third-hand somebody-told-me stuff, all of it coming from witnesses whose own unsavory past records tend to discredit their reliability...

...Flat, angry denials and painstaken, detailed denials come from the accused...

...McCarthy will be given the color of barely possible truth by the not quite answerable question: "Yeah, sure, but how about Alger Hiss...

...Back in the middle and late 1930's, in the days of aid for Loyalist Spain and of the Munich betrayal, the line between the Communists and the non-Communist liberals was sometimes, on the surface, paper-thin...

...these are important names, important men...

...Is Your Idea o[ a Meeting with Stalin Copyrighted...

...His articles on politics and the (aw have appeared in many publications, including Harper's, Life, The American Mercury, The Reader's Digest, and frequently, in the columns of The Progressive...